As is always the case, it has been extremely interesting to travel around China  and to talk to colleagues at various research centres and think tanks.  My discussions have focused on global governance and the G20.  And in the current context, of course, there have been large dollops of discussion on the impending Hu Jintao state visit to Washington.

Let me focus on that just a bit.  I have acknowledged in a recent blog post the growing commentary in the US characterizing and then analyzing  the US-China relationship – “Defining the Key Relationship“.  In this post I comment on the Zbigniew Brzezinski op-ed from the NYT.  Brzezinski argued that the leaders should work to produce a declaration to set out the basic principles and practices that should govern the US-China relationship.  I must say I was rather critical of this approach and argued for pragmatic and meaningful steps to advance US-China collaboration.

I am less puzzled now by Brzezinski’s deliverable.  For at stop after stop I got an earful from my colleagues about US policy being unilateral and potentially harmful for other G20 and a wider circle of countries. Colleagues raised the spillover impact of current US policy most notably quantitative easing or QE2.  Though indirectly acknowledging China’s unilateral and hurtful efforts  – mainly fixed exchange – China experts, chose to attack current US efforts.

It would appear that neither country comes away with clean hands and each threatens to impact the G20 countries with policies  carrying significant spillover implications.